Nostalgie de la boue

Why France is still so keen to support and protect a declining business

WHEN President Jacques Chirac visited the agricultural fair in Paris in March, he stayed for three hours. He was upstaged a few days later by his prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who squeezed in an astonishing seven hours. Such is the lingering hold of farming on the French imagination that no self-respecting politician can ever miss the chance to pose with a heaving Charolais bull, or to cuddle a kid goat. Now France's strange bond with farming is under fire once again. The European Commission wants to revive the Doha round of world trade talks by offering to eliminate all export subsidies for farm products, a concession that is fiercely resisted in Paris. What is it about the French and farming?

France is, admittedly, the European Union's biggest overall producer by some way (see chart); it leads in cereals, sugar beet, cattle and poultry. It also has more farmland—making up 22% of the EU 15's agricultural surface area—than any other EU country. A founder member of the European project and chief architect of its much-derided common agricultural policy (CAP), it is also the biggest beneficiary of EU farm subsidies.

Yet the importance of agriculture in France, as elsewhere, has shrivelled. In 1958 one in five French workers was engaged in farming; today, that share has shrunk to just over 3%. Farming accounts for a shade under 3% of GDP, a bit less than as it did in Britain 30 years ago. Young people are less keen to take on their parents' farms; they are leaving in droves from such upland places as Auvergne or Vaucluse. “It costs too much, the weather's too unpredictable, and it's hard work,” says a retired sunflower and wheat farmer near Velleron, in Vaucluse, whose son has decided not to stay in the business. “Young people here would prefer a steady job at the town hall.”

Given this change, why does farming continue to cast its spell over French people and their politicians? Much is down to nostalgia and tradition. From its landscape painters to its culinary prowess, France's image of itself is rooted in the land. Behind the pseudo-rustic packaging of provençal honey or olives in cloth-topped jars, there is a genuine link between local produce and the cuisine of different terroirs. Although most French towns are ringed by vast hypermarkets, shoppers still flock to cheaper and fresher street markets. The daily farmers' market in Velleron, where local producers turn up in the evening after a day in the field to sell thick white asparagus or early strawberries from the back of their pick-ups, is always thronged.

Another explanation is geography. France is big, wide and relatively empty: over half its surface area is farmland, and some four-fifths of the country is rural. The French economy industrialised relatively late, so family links to farms and villages still linger. And the French are keenly aware that it is their farmers who keep the countryside the way that the tourists who descend on it each year like it.

But the most important explanation is political. Farming made Mr Chirac's career. He was first elected to parliament in Corrèze, in rural Limousin, in 1967. His first cabinet job, in 1972, was as agriculture minister. His wife, Bernadette, has been a local councillor in Corrèze for over 30 years. In the most recent campaign, she appeared with a startled piglet in her arms, begging it not to pee on her while the photographers snapped. Despite the odd liberal voice within his government, it is Mr Chirac who dictates farm policy—and that means fighting to preserve the CAP. “It's not a political battle that you can win,” comments one reform-minded official, “so it's not one worth fighting.”

Hence the instant French condemnation of the offer by Pascal Lamy, the (French) EU trade commissioner, to scrap farm export subsidies. Hervé Gaymard, the farm minister, dismissed it as “unwelcome”, and denounced the Americans for increasing their own farm support. In parliament, Jean-Claude Carle, a centre-right senator from Haute Savoie, declared himself “shocked, not to say scandalised” by Mr Lamy's plan. The French now have a line, first drawn by Mr Chirac a year ago, that any concessions on export subsidies must benefit poor African countries. “If it is to help poor countries, yes; if it is to help rich counties increase their market share in Europe, then no,” says one official.

Helping Africa is a laudable objective. But French concessions in the name of reform do not always amount to much. The deal hatched between Mr Chirac and Germany's Gerhard Schröder in late 2002, which freezes CAP spending in real terms until 2013, was hailed in France as a big concession. The more liberal-minded hoped that it might force through deeper CAP reform, by holding down spending even after the ten new EU members had joined. Yet, with these (farm-intensive) arrivals queuing up for their turn at the trough, it looks more like a deal to shelter the CAP from a radical overhaul.

Does France have so much to fear from reform? Mr Gaymard told Le Figaro this week that “without the CAP, our agriculture would disappear”. Really? Many of its big farms are highly efficient. The yield per hectare of sugar-beet producers, for instance, is higher than in any other country in Europe, and 25% above Germany's. Much CAP support has gone to mechanised big farms, such as the cereal growers of the Paris basin. Yet most French farms are small and family-run, and eke out a living without much help from Brussels. Those who raise pigs and poultry, grow fruit and vegetables or make wine get little CAP support. Brittany pig farmers and Bordeaux wine growers, for example, are in trouble thanks to falling prices and flagging consumption—and no help is coming from Brussels.

The French dislike talking of farming in vulgar terms of efficiency. Farm support is not about competitiveness, but the need to keep the French countryside—its jobs, its hedgerows, its olive groves—as it is. In some ways, policy is moving this way. Under past CAP reforms, subsidies are being “decoupled” from production, removing the incentive to over-produce. Instead they are being converted into direct payments to farmers linked to respect for the environment, food safety and animal welfare.

Yet even this sensible switch vexes some in the French government. Officials fret that it will, in effect, create a new class of state-employed, risk-averse rural gardeners. And farmers fear emasculation. “We want French agriculture to be about production,” says Jean-Paul Bastian, of FNSEA, the farmers' union, “not just about turning us into caretakers of the land.”